Nantucketers race against erosion

Residents of the southeast shore of Nantucket are pitting the best technology that island wealth can buy against the crumbling of the bluff that holds up their homes.

DOUG FRASER

NANTUCKET – On a sunny, unseasonably warm day in January, Baxter Road was a war zone.

The blue haze of diesel exhaust and dust hung over the narrow lane of picturesque waterfront homes clad in gray cedar shingles and chalk-white trim. And there was an undercurrent of urgency as construction workers hustled from one task to the next amid the loud thrumming of an endless parade of dump trucks carrying load after load of precious sand from two inland sand pits.

In Siasconset, at the southeastern edge of Nantucket, there is a pitched battle to save homes from sliding into the sea, and the weapon of choice is sand. Lots and lots of sand.

Backhoes fed a conveyer belt that trundled sand out over the cliff edge, spilling it onto the face of the bluff at a rate of 180 cubic yards – nine dump truck loads – per hour. At $27 per cubic yard, that's $4,860 per hour – a golden cascade to shore up the steep cliff face and fill long textile tubes, known as Geotubes.

Between 100 and 225 feet long, nearly 6 feet high and 45 feet in circumference, they will be laid out on the beach in a three-tiered, nearly 900-foot-long wall designed to protect the toe of the bluff from corrosive storm waves.

This is a controversial $2 million emergency project, paid for by some well-to-do property owners but backed by the town in an effort to stop erosion long enough to relocate buried water and sewer lines and find an alternative access for the homes along Baxter Road.

But homeowners, organized as the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund, hope this experiment will evolve into a permanent solution to an implacable erosion rate that exceeds 10 feet per year on average along the northern portion of the bluff.

“The Geotubes will stop erosion and will hold up well,” predicted fund president Josh Posner. He hopes these high-tech sandbags will prove more palatable than stone to the town's Conservation Commission and be used in a proposed 4,200-foot-long sea wall.

According to fund records, of the 50 original homes on the ocean side of the road, 12 have been moved and eight demolished . Eight more – a mix of cottages and more substantial homes – sit less than 15 feet from the edge, and some are within 5 feet. Many homes in the area have historic significance and represent a wide range of architectural styles.

Posner recalled when the cliff edge near his family vacation home was a gently sloping 300-foot path down a dune face vegetated with scotch broom and rosa rugosa. That's gone, along with 50 feet of his lot.

“People think we never should have moved here in the first place,” said Posner. “But I was 10 years old. If you looked at that bluff 54 or even 34 years ago, you would not be thinking this is washing away.”

Other property owners on the ocean side of Baxter Road are relative newcomers. Many of the lots now threatened were sold at reduced prices in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the problem was well-known.

“My wife and I are gamblers. We'll try and beat the odds,” said John DeAngelis, 73, in a phone interview from his Santa Cruz, Calif., home. In 2000, he sold some rental properties to buy a 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bath home at 109 Baxter Road for $1.1 million. He insists the real estate agent didn't tell him of the extent of the erosion problem and he had 55 feet to the edge of the bluff.

He's lost about a foot each year and figured he'd get 20 years before he had to move. “We got 13,” he said.

He lost a big chunk of frontage in 2005, and then nothing for eight years. Then came last winter.

“It was a beautiful yard. All stacked stone walls, stairways, and it's all gone. We're 10 feet from the edge,” he said.

DeAngelis is gambling again that the steep cliff will not crumble before he can get a permit to move his home to an adjacent lot. He estimated it will cost him $200,000 in retirement savings.

“We are retired. We don't have trust funds,” he said. “If we spend the money, we can save (the house) for another 15 to 20 years.”

On the ocean side, property values have eroded like the cliffs. DeAngelis' land and house, with an ocean view, are now assessed at $515,000. Similar homes on the other side of Baxter Road have far higher sales prices and assessments. DeAngelis does not understand why the town won't allow a rock wall to protect his property.

“The island of Nantucket has been besieged by extreme tree hugging,” he said. “The Conservation Commission has several people ... that have their own agendas to not allow development and preserve bugs and beetles and not the homeowner trying to save what we've got.”

It's not like the beach preservation fund hasn't tried other methods.

“We're listening to a different proposal every month,” said Nantucket Conservation Commission Vice Chairwoman Sarah Oktay.

In 2008, the fund failed to get state or town meeting approval for a $25 million proposal to mine sand from an offshore sandbar and pump it onto the beach. Other projects have come and gone, such as draining water from incoming waves and leaving behind the sand deposits, and creating jute-covered terraces to foster plant growth. Both failed.

One of three proposals waiting in the wings is the fund's proposal for a 4,200-foot-long, 28-foot-high stone seawall. Posner believes it will face stiff resistance from the commission, which will hear proposals from the fund and the town on long-term solutions at a meeting at 4 p.m. Wednesday at 4 Fairgrounds Road.

Others believe it is futile to resist the overpowering force of nature.

Coastal geologist Robert Young, the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, said he believes the Geotubes will ultimately be torn apart by the massive force of Atlantic storms. And he thinks the tubes will have the same negative impacts as a stone wall, causing wave energy to reflect off the hard surface, scouring out the beach in front of it and increasing the erosion rate on adjoining properties.

Young and others also worry that a revetment would trap the sand that helps to replenish offshore sandbars and barrier beaches all along the eastern side of the island.

“That bank is one of the largest, if not the largest, in terms of its volume of sediment supply,” Cormac Collier, the executive director of the Nantucket Land Council, said about the Siasconset bluff.

To offset the loss of sediment from the bank, the fund has committed to covering the 900 feet of Geotubes with 20,000 cubic yards of sand each year, equivalent to what geologists said erodes off the cliff face each year. That amount would increase proportionally if a more extensive wall were built.

Young believes that amount of sand is too costly and unsustainable to supply.

“At some point you have to realize that trying to (put up sea walls) is destroying natural beaches and turning them into engineering projects,” he said.

The beach in front of the Siasconset bluff is public property, although fund members argue it is little used, said Collier.

“Since when has that been the measurement of the value of a piece of public property?” he said. “Here we are knowingly going to allow a public beach to be destroyed, and many feel that is too steep a price to pay.”

It's too steep a price, some said, just to protect a relatively small group of property owners.

At least one Baxter Road resident agrees that the cure would do more harm than the erosion itself.

“I think it's impossible to stop the impact of erosion without doing such damage to the beach and the coastal bank that building revetments and other hard-armoring are not solutions,” said John Merson, who lives on the ocean side of Baxter Road. He said he thinks that there is still room elsewhere on the island to move the homes.

“Houses are movable and replaceable, and beaches are not,” he said.

The town of Nantucket has a stake in the project, too. Baxter Road is a public way and the town has a legal obligation to maintain access to properties as well as provide sewer, water and electricity. The emergency permit to build the Geotube wall was approved in part because the eroding bluff was just 7 feet from the distance required to trigger a permanent road closure. Officials are scrambling to come up with an emergency plan to deliver those services in case that happens.

Looking beyond the emergency measures, Nantucket Public Works Director Kara Buzanoski said she has been directed by selectmen to move ahead with finding an alternative access for properties along Baxter Road. Estimates total $4.5 million to create the access roads and move sewer and water lines. Land takings could boost the cost to $10 million, Buzanoski said.

That could make the fund offer to pay for the installation of a seawall attractive. But Posner said that the town should share in the cost of annually replenishing 80,000 or more cubic yards of sand that could be required each year.

Earlier this month, J.B. Pellicer, president of Fish Tec and his crew of 11 worked down on the beach below the bluffs. It was another in a string of 12-hour days, in a series of seven-day workweeks stretching back to Dec. 19. Under the terms of the emergency permit issued by the town conservation commission, they had 30 days to complete the work. Project manager Jamie Feeley of Cottage & Castle builders said the tubes were finished by Jan. 20 and all that remained to be done was to cover them with sand.

Two backhoes swiveled and dug furiously, trying to keep a channel open from the sea to supply the pump that mixed the sand provided by a third backhoe into a pressurized slurry. That slurry was pumped into the enormous textile tubes.

Feeley said the local sand supply could last a while. He estimated there are a million cubic yards of sand remaining in the two island sand pits.

“There's a lot of sand out there,” he said.

The Baxter Road homeowners won't return until summer nears. The homes are largely empty. Painted plaques hang on silvered shingles carved with tired puns, sometimes freighted with their own special irony, like “House of Cards,” and “Just Bluffin.'”

Some homes are on the move. Workers scrambled around the foundation of a rambling two-story mini-mansion that had been sliced in two, floor joists braced by a criss-cross of massive I-beams and lifted high off its foundation by a computerized system of hydraulic jacks. A new foundation waited, curing in the sun just a few feet away. The home will glide the 30 feet on rollers atop stacked cribbing with a front end loader to tug it into place.

“We cannot possibly hope to hold the shoreline forever,” Young said. “We need places where we can think outside the box and develop plans to relocate infrastructure away from these rapidly eroding shorelines.”